Euro (EUR) Data Coverage: Indicators, Sources and Release Times

Quick answer

FXMacroData serves 36 euro series from the production catalogue, published by the European Central Bank (ECB), Eurostat, the European Commission, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Bank for International Settlements. They cover the three ECB policy rates, €STR, the euro area yield curve from 1 to 30 years, HICP and core inflation, PPI, GDP, retail sales, the labour market, sentiment surveys, the balance of payments and M1, M2 and M3.

For EUR/USD the decisive releases are ECB decisions, the flash HICP and the growth and labour data that shape the ECB's outlook. Every release carries its announcement timestamp, so a model can line up EUR/USD price action with the exact second the euro area data were published.

This guide covers what the EUR catalogue contains, who publishes each series, when it is released in Frankfurt time and UTC, and how traders use the data in EUR/USD and the euro crosses.

Who publishes euro area data

European Central Bank. The ECB's Governing Council sets three policy rates at eight monetary policy meetings a year. The ECB also publishes €STR, the euro area yield curves, the monetary aggregates and the euro area balance of payments. FXMacroData reads these from the ECB Data Portal and the ECB's own key-interest-rate history.

Eurostat. The EU statistics office publishes the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), including the flash estimate, GDP, retail trade, producer prices, the unemployment rate, the Labour Force Survey and the labour cost index.

European Commission. DG ECFIN publishes the Economic Sentiment Indicator and the consumer confidence indicator from its business and consumer surveys.

Deutsche Bundesbank and BIS. The real-yield series uses Bundesbank quotes for German inflation-linked federal bonds. The trade-weighted index is the BIS nominal effective exchange rate (broad basket, 2020=100), not the ECB's EER-19 or EER-41 index.

New releases typically reach the API within seconds of official publication; measured timings are on the release speed page.

EUR indicators covered

Every series below is listed at /v1/data_catalogue/eur. The slug in brackets is the indicator value used in API calls. Where a series is a proxy for something the euro area does not publish, the description says so.

Policy and rates

• ECB deposit facility rate (policy_rate): the rate that anchors euro money markets, stored as one row per Governing Council decision with holds included, back to 1999.
• Other ECB policy rates (main refinancing operations rate, marginal lending facility rate): the other two corners of the ECB corridor, decided at the same meetings.
• €STR (risk_free_rate): the euro short-term rate, the daily overnight benchmark published by the ECB since October 2019.
• Euro area yield curve (1-year, 2-year, 3-year, 4-year, 5-year, 7-year, 10-year, 20-year, 30-year): daily spot rates from the ECB's estimated all-ratings euro area government curve. The euro area has no single sovereign issuer, so these are points on a fitted curve rather than any one country's benchmark bond.
• Real yield (about 10 years) (inflation_linked_bond): a monthly real yield taken from the German inflation-linked federal bond closest to ten years from maturity, as quoted by the Bundesbank. There is no official euro area constant-maturity real yield, so FXMacroData builds this one from official quotes.
• 10-year all-ratings minus AAA spread (breakeven_inflation_rate): despite its slug, this is not a market inflation breakeven. The ECB publishes no euro area breakeven series, so this serves the spread between the all-ratings and the AAA-rated euro area curves at 10 years. It measures credit and liquidity risk across euro area sovereigns, which is useful in its own right for fragmentation stress.

Inflation

• HICP inflation (inflation): headline year-on-year HICP for the euro area, including the flash estimate. This is the measure the ECB targets at 2 percent.
• Core HICP (core_inflation): HICP excluding food and energy, released with the headline. It is one of the most closely watched gauges of underlying inflation.
• Producer Price Index (ppi): year-on-year industrial producer prices.

Growth and activity

• GDP (gdp): quarterly euro area GDP in EUR billion.
• Retail sales (retail_sales): year-on-year change in retail trade volume.
• Economic Sentiment Indicator (business_confidence): the Commission's composite of five sector confidence balances, used here as the euro area's business confidence measure and normalised to a 0 to 100 scale.
• Consumer confidence (consumer_confidence): the Commission's consumer confidence indicator, normalised to a 0 to 100 scale.

Labour market

• Unemployment rate (unemployment): the monthly euro area rate from Eurostat.
• Labour Force Survey (employment, full-time, part-time, participation rate): quarterly LFS figures for ages 15 to 64.
• Wages (labour cost index) (wages): quarterly year-on-year growth in the wages and salaries component of Eurostat's labour cost index, a key input to the ECB's services inflation view.

External accounts

• Current account balance (current_account_balance): monthly, from the ECB balance of payments, in EUR million.
• Trade in goods and services (trade balance, balance on goods, balance on services): monthly balance of payments figures from the ECB. The trade balance is the sum of the goods and services balances from the same release, not Eurostat's goods-only trade statistics.
• Trade-weighted index (BIS NEER) (trade_weighted_index): monthly nominal effective exchange rate of the euro.

Money and credit

• Monetary aggregates (M1, M2, M3): monthly, in EUR billion. M3 growth is the ECB's traditional monetary-analysis indicator, and M1 tends to lead the business cycle.

EUR release timing

Times are in Frankfurt (Europe/Berlin), where the ECB is based; Eurostat in Luxembourg and the Commission in Brussels use the same clock. The UTC column shows central European summer time (CEST, UTC+2) first and winter time (CET, UTC+1) second.

The 11:00 Eurostat slot sits in the middle of the London morning, when EUR/USD liquidity is deepest. National CPI releases from Germany, France, Italy and Spain often come out before the euro area flash, but they are not part of the EUR catalogue. Upcoming dates are on the release calendar, and ECB statements appear in the EUR press release feed.

Worked example: the September 2026 flash HICP

Eurostat published the September 2026 flash HICP on Friday 2 October 2026 at 11:00 Frankfurt time. This request returns it:

curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" "https://api.fxmacrodata.com/v1/announcements/eur/inflation?start_date=2026-09-01"

The newest row in the response (abridged to the core fields):

{
  "date": "2026-09-01",
  "val": 3.8,
  "announcement_datetime": 1790931600,
  "previous_value": 3.2,
  "previous_date": "2026-08-01"
}

For euro area HICP the date field marks the reference month by its first day, so 2026-09-01 is September 2026. val is inflation of 3.8 percent year on year, up from 3.2 percent in August, and announcement_datetime 1790931600 is 09:00:00 UTC, which is 11:00 CEST. A reading that far above the ECB's 2 percent target, and rising, is the kind of print that pushes rate expectations and EUR/USD in the same direction within seconds.

How traders use EUR data

HICP against the ECB's 2 percent target

Follow headline and core HICP against the deposit facility rate. When core inflation stays above target, markets price a higher-for-longer ECB, which supports EUR/USD if the Fed is not moving the same way. The flash release is the market mover; the final release rarely changes the number.

Policy and 2-year differentials

The euro area 2-year spot rate minus the US 2-year yield is the classic EUR/USD rate signal. Both are available in the same JSON format, so the spread can be computed directly by date. Use €STR to check how the deposit rate is transmitting into overnight funding.

Fragmentation risk

The all-ratings minus AAA spread at 10 years widens when markets demand more to hold lower-rated euro area sovereigns. A sharp widening has historically coincided with euro weakness and has preceded ECB tools aimed at containing spreads.

Growth and sentiment surprises

The Economic Sentiment Indicator and consumer confidence land before the hard data for the same month. Combine them with retail sales and the unemployment rate to judge whether a growth slowdown is strong enough to change the ECB's path.

External balance

The euro area's current account surplus is a structural source of euro demand. A shrinking surplus, visible in the goods and services balances, removes some of that support, which matters more for EUR/USD over months than on release day.

Related pages

• European Central Bank: key indicators and API data guide
• EUR/USD dashboard
• EUR/GBP dashboard
• Release calendar
• EUR press releases
• FXMacroData data coverage across all 22 currencies